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Asheville City Council Considers Living Wage Proposal

The Chamber recently conducted an anonymous "living wage" survey with our membership to provide input for a City of Asheville "Living Wage" Task Force. The survey was designed to help determine how current or potential contracts would be impacted by the living wage proposal up for consideration by the City Council in March; specifically, all services contracts (of any amount) and construction contracts amounting to less than $30,000.

General Response Information

We received a total of 169 responses. Of those:

• 67% of respondents have done business with the City of Asheville within the past 5 years or plan to do business with the City of Asheville at some time in the future
• 41% of respondents are small businesses with 1-15 employees; 5.3% responded that they have 16-30 employees; 7% have 31-100 employees; 3% have more than 100 employees; and 44.3% skipped this question
  

Living Wage Proposal – Overall Responses

80 (47.3%) respondents say that a living wage requirement would not affect the business they do with the City; however, 22.7% did not respond (see below for the responses only from businesses that would be affected by the proposal)

50 (29.6%) survey participants responded that a living wage requirement would have an effect on the business they do with the City of Asheville, 37 (74%) of those responded with an open-ended answer.

These are categorized generally as:

• 42% of respondents believe it will increase the cost of business (either with City contracts or overall operations*) 
• 8% of respondents said they would not continue to do business with the City
• 10% of respondents cite concerns over the current economic climate
• 0.6% said their business would be forced to lay off workers
• 10% of respondents said they would do more business with the City or otherwise felt that their business would be encouraged
• 14% of overall respondents felt that such a requirement equates to government overstepping its boundaries
  

Living Wage Proposal – Responses from Potentially-Affected Businesses

Since the proposal would affect only services contracts (of any amount) and construction contracts amounting to less than $30,000, this survey is further broken down into responses from those businesses that fall into one of the categories that would be affected by this proposal.
71 of the 169 responses (approximately 39.6%) fall into this category.**

Of those:

• 4 are construction firms with contract amounts under $30,000 and the other 67 belong to the service industry
• 33.8% of these 71 respondents whose businesses fall into this category say that a living wage requirement would have an effect on the business they do with the City. Fully 66.2% of all respondents whose businesses would be affected by this proposal answered that this requirement would NOT have an effect on the business they do with the City of Asheville

For more in-depth information on this survey, including average wage information provided by survey participants, please click on the links below for a pdf report. The reports are organized by how survey participants responded to the question “Would a living wage requirement have an impact on the business you do or might do with the City?” (39 responses with blank answers on this and other key questions are not included)

Respondents who answered “yes” (50)
Respondents who answered “no” (80)

*e.g., “Practically speaking, all of our company wage rates will have to be adjusted to the City standard; otherwise we will be creating hard feelings with all other employees and negative effects on all of our business operations.”

**39 survey respondents chose not to answer this question with either a “yes” or “no”